When I have too much to say, I have no listener. It becomes immensely difficult for a talkative me to keep my thoughts to myself. I have to express it and this happens to be an ideal platform for me to do so.

A not so lyrical life...

Disclaimer: I might sound like an old 80 year old aunty, so you may ignore this post if you find it boring...

My dad has a thing for old songs, which is why he insisted on keeping a purana radio with him just to listen to old hindi songs on vividh bharati early in the morning. He passed on his love for old music to me and even I am as hooked to Vividh Bharati as him. Every morning I wake up to the lovely old hindi songs with no interruptions from irritating RJs and boring advertisements. Yesterday I heard a beautiful song called - Tadbir se bigadhi huvi takdir bana le. It's one of my favorite songs but I could relate to the lyrics only when I heard it yesterday and that's when I knew that the song was written by the great Sahir Ludhianvi. Till date, it was a Geeta Dutt song for me, I never made an effort to know the name of the lyricist. Later in the day, I started hunting for more of his songs and I was hooked to this genius. His lyrics were so pure. His poetry was so simple, yet so deep. Almost all of his lyrics had an underlying social message. I started reading about him and that's when I came across his background. Sahir saab and his contemporaries have gone through a lot in their life, which is often reflected in their lyrics.They have seen the freedom struggle, the world war, independence, partition, shaky government, India - China war, India - Pakistan war, emergency and what not. There was optimism, anger, passion and all those emotions in their lyrics. Their lyrics were progressive and gave you hopes. No wonder my dad is still hooked to these songs and hates it when a song like 'aaj blue hai pani pani pani pani' is played outside :).

Cut to the present times where music and lyrics are pure thrash. In 21st century, we have songs like 'ab karoonga tere saath, gandi baat' to which kids as young as 3 year old dance. Except for the awesome Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Piyush Mishra, Prasoon Joshi and Amitabh Bhattacharya, I can't think of any lyricist who writes good poetry anymore. None of the lyrics make you think, motivate you or lift your spirit. There is no 'woh subah kabhi toh aayegi' to give you solace when you find darkness looming around you, there is no 'kuch toh log kahenge, logon ka kaam hai kehna' to help you ignore the cynical society, and no we don't have a 'tadbir se bigadhi huvi takdir bana le' to challenge us in life. This doesn't mean that we do not have good lyrics now, but he bad lyrics outnumber the good ones.

Let's lead a lyrical life...

Movies and songs are reflection of what is happening in the society. So the movies in 50s and 60s were focused on patriotism and social problems, while the 70s movies focused on youth anger (more due to emergency, wars and unemployment). There was a sudden degradation in the quality of movies and songs after 80s. I wonder if it is it because we are not challenged? Is it because we live a comparatively easier life than our parents? Of course we have also seen the ghastly terror attacks, recession but we seem to be less affected than the older generation. We have not gone through major setbacks in life, the reason why we give up so easily on relationships, jobs and even life! We lack the fighting spirit. We seem to live in a state of inertia, which is why movies or lyrics no longer have any depth or significance. Our movies do not have anything to refer to, so our film makers have to resort to making lame biographies of stalwarts or remakes of old gems, and not so funny so-called sex comedy movies. I'm not saying that we need to have instability in the society to become creative. But let's make it creative in our own way. Let's get out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves. After all, our life is not all about paying EMIs and running the rat race. Make your life such that you can write a biography about yourself. Experience all types of challenges so that you can write a poem about your life :).

i don't think it differs with time or age,its about growing up with values and leading morally right life which we don't find in contemporary society.tough life is associated with morals and which makes your mind rich and abundant in thoughts.so even in contemporary society someone who has lived that way sounds like 1920's.

so we need people with great character or values to create great work and to appreciate such work.one of songs i like the most is manmarziyan from lootera. when you listen to this song,you will feel alone,awesome,out of world.your post has real substance which we hardly find in contemporary blogs.hmm,that was good one.

About me

Hi, i am Gayathri Vishwanathan. No not even distantly related to Vishwanathan Anand.
Wanted to be a journalist, but ended up in a usual corporate job.
Mundane activities of life take up my time, and when I reach my saturation point, I try to calm myself either by listening to music or through writing.
Let me warn you, my blogs are nothing like what others write, it is boring and sometimes tiresome (not to forget the thousands of spelling and grammatical errors I make), however I write with the intention to express myself and to strike a personal chord with everyone who reads this blog.
Hope to see you here baar baar lagataar :)